Walkman: Music On The Sony Xperia P

Sony has a track record with music on their popular Walkman brand, and they have brought that to play in their smartphones. The music player on the Sony Xperia P is appropriately named Walkman.

I am a music lover, and one of the things a mobile can do to impress me is get music playback right. Music, and photos. The Sony Xperia P does music better than most mobiles I have reviewed. Here is a brief walk through of what makes the Walkman experience on the Xperia P stand out:

Audio Quality

Audio playback quality (and when I use this term, I always mean via built-in loudspeaker) on the Xperia P is superb.

There are sound enhancements options available. These include an equalizer (with up to 7 preset options and one custom option), and xLOUD, a feature that enhances the loudness of the built-in loudspeaker. In all, audio reproduction on the Xperia P is really good. Loudness and quality are comparable to what the BlackBerry Bold 9650 delivers, which really is as good as it gets on mobile. Yes; like the BlackBerry PlayBook is superb in audio playback, so is the 2010 Bold 9650.

Download Music Info & Album Art

Built into the Walkman app is a service that lets you connect to Gracenote’s online database of music metadata to update music info and album art of your songs. I have 817 songs on the Xperia P at the moment, and this feature did a good job of updating the info for many of them.

Edit Music Info

This is my first time of running into this on a smartphone. The feature lets you manually edit music info, including: Title, Artist, Album, Year, Track number, and Album Art. Like the Download music info feature, it is powered by Gracenote. So, if the Gracenote database is unable to update the info of a particular track, you can do it manually all by yourself. Nice!

The Usual Suspects

In addition to the above, there are options to shuffle and repeat songs. You can set the app to repeat just one song or your entire collection. Songs can be accessed via Tracks, Albums, Artists, Playlists, and Favourites. There are auto playlists for newly added, most played and never played songs.

I am so falling in love with Sony’s Xperia range from the short time I have had with the P. Timescape UI is one of the most polished custom skins on Android, and the music, video and camera experience on this device is very good. Sounds like just what the doctor recommended for me. I wonder what the experience on the Xperia S and Z would be like considering that they pack more impressive hardware.

About The Author

Mister Mo

Storyteller, Content Marketing god, Multiple-award winning Digital Technologist, Speaker, Trainer. Mister Mo has been using and reviewing smartphones since the days of the Nokia Communicators. Detailed Profile.